The Vitalist

A Literary Laundry Blog

The Sequel To Before Sunset and Life Itself

Before Midnight the sequel to Before Sunset which was the sequel to Before Sunset (Joseph son of Jacob son of…) has made its film premier at Sundance and will soon everywhere in theaters so that I can watch it and…what other film deserves a run on sentence to begin an essay and what other film or sequel to a film am I more afraid of writing about (and watching) as Before Midnight? Because…what other film has so worked its way into the way that I think and talk and live than the Before Sunrise and Sunset…to the point where someone the other evening in a bookstore maybe because of my age (24) or my hair (wavy/greasy) said that I sounded like Ethan Hawke in Before Sunrise…and who was that person other than a European girl I was going to end up walking around New York with, talking, with until 5 a.m… and how bizarre is it that without trying but without not not trying you can begin to become just like Pierre Menard writing Don Quixote word for word without actually reading the book itself or having it open in front of you to copy? Or that my college girlfriend resembles Clarissa Dalloway and that I swear I feel just like Peter Walsh when I see her with her Richard Dalloway-esc probably future husband or that the love I feel I’ve lost for good reminds me not a little of La Maga in Cortazar’s Hopscotch or that when Kundera’s Tomas talks about his erotic escapades I can’t help but think…but no the point is that Before Midnight is coming to theaters unavoidably soon and that my whole generation—twenty years younger than Jesse and Celine will be in the new film—will plan dates on Couchsurfing and call it their “before sunrise” moment and talk about it on Skype with the person they met on Couchsurfing the week after they had their planned affair, not realizing that it took Jesse and Celine ten years to find each other again and that they met in the first place as strangers on a train and…that the reason they love the films so much, anyway, is because it represents a fatalism that their own romanticism has lost… which makes their own romanticism not romanticism at all, but a kind of irony that they themselves aren’t even aware of… Before Midnight according to early reviews is “perfect” and I don’t doubt it because Before Sunset was perfect probably the first or second best film of the last decade and had an ending even more perfect than the film itself and I have no doubt that it will say something incredibly important about the way our relationships in the west in the first world in the postmodern world are…that it will be beautiful and poignant and real…but all of that makes me terrified that the whole point of these beautiful films is to become an icon for a whole generation of unreality and a whole generation of superficiality that it will be easier to blog about it (my god what am I doing?) than actually live. That a life centered around the search for love, the search for a genuine connection with another person is much harder to attain than the status of modern romantic is to acquire…and what’s the point of genuinely great films about love (and these films are genuinely great) if we don’t know how to be genuinely great lovers…if we lack the recognition in our own lives of what makes a single night, a single conversation, a single kiss worthy of a film, or book, or record, or poem, or painting? Standard intellectual criticism isn’t enough to describe why it’s so important that Linklater’s films exist, or why it’s so terrifying that we find ourselves needing those films and emulating them…why Jesse and Celine themselves, in Before Sunset, almost as if they were us, having watched Before Sunrise, discuss how important that first night (that first film) was…I will undoubtedly go to see Before Midnight more than once, and I will certainly go the first night is available in wide-release…but my eagerness and the eagerness of those like me (and they are legion) is only a sign that life, while it can often emulate art…can rarely attain its magnificence.

MG

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